University of Strathclyde

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CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Peter and Wendy (1911)

1. Peter Pan's generation.
1.1 Kenneth Graham, The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898): offered new way of representing 'world of childhood as a self-sufficient and self-generated adventure'; The Wind in the Willows (1908) - 'a book without a child in it', save perhaps for Toad, and without females (Children's Literature: An Illustrated History, pp.173-4, 180).
1.2 Edith Nesbit: The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), The Amulet (1906), The Railway Children (1906), The Enchanted Castle (1907), etc; realism and fantasy; parody of other children's writing; socialism.
1.3 'There was a strong heroic ethos in much of the writing for children between 1890 and 1914, as if the generation doomed to die on the battlefield had been reared with exactly the ideals needed to persuade them to volunteer as soon as they could. To what extent did their childhood reading help to determine the fate of a whole generation?' 'The later nineteenth century had seen a massive increase in writing for boys, school stories, stories of travel, quest, and adventure in far-flung places, and historical novels that perpetuated myths of heroism, male comradeship, and courage in the face of danger, and even death. Stories of this kind filled the "penny-dreadfuls", but in more stylish and sophisticated versions they provided the staple for the family magazines that proliferated before the First World War' (Children's Literature, pp.187, 189).
1.4 Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book (1894), Stalky & Co (1899), Kim (1901), Just So Stories (1902), Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906); in Stalky & Co, central character 'employs the playful, aggressive, and competitive aspects of school as a preparation for life in the Indian army on the North-West Frontier' (p.188); public school/children's literature/British Empire.
1.5 Henry Rider Haggard: King Solomon's Mines (1885); She (1887).
1.6 Arthur Conan Doyle: The Lost World (1912), etc, plus Sherlock Holmes series, beginning with A Study in Scarlet (1887).
1.7 John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), etc.
1.8 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1914) (with 24 sequels).

2. Robert Baden-Powell: numerous fictional and non-fictional books for boys; most well-known is Scouting for Boys (first edition 1908; numerous later editions).

3. Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud: radical challenge to conventional images of children/childhood; no immediate impact on children's literature, but see William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1955).
3.1 Freud's whole work entails rethinking ideas about children and childhood, but particularly Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905-24):

It was left to Sigmund Freud to point out to a disbelieving world the self-evident fact of children's sexuality: 'If mankind had been able to learn from a direct observation of children, these three essays ... could have remained unwritten.' And it is no coincidence that he wrote them in these years, from 1890 to the 1920s, years in which children's literature was most heavily invested in denial. (Julia Briggs, in Children's Literature, p.170)

3.2 Henry James: What Masie Knew (1897) and The Turn of the Screw (1898).
3.3 Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900): first of series about American fairytale land of Oz; gay subtext (and more so in the film)?
3.4 Hilaire Belloc, Cautionary Tales (1908): nonsense verses as 'vehicle for subversive energies', parodying moralising of Watts, et al (Children's Literature, p.171).

4. J.M. Barrie (1860-1937): Scottish playwright and novelist.
4.1 Peter Pan (as a baby) first appeared in adult novel The Little White Bird (1902) in story told by a bachelor to a small boy he has kidnapped; published separately as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) (Oxford World Classics, pp.3-65); refashioned as a boy in the play Peter Pan (first performed, 1904), and then in Peter and Wendy (1911) (often entitled Peter Pan).
4.2 Peter Pan in the play and in Peter and Wendy is 'The ultimate expression of the boyish heroism that suffuses these years ... He embodies the ideal boy's heroic aspiration to deeds of intelligence, daring, and courage, yet he is also magically exempt from fear and mortality, so that his courage is complicated if not compromised, at once performing and calling into question the clichés of heroism' (Children's Literature, pp.189-90).
4.3 'Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is for adults. In its whimsical glorying in childhood, its clever pastiches of literary styles, its mock-humble sententiousness, its quick-footed changes of stance, its traces of pagan mysticism, it is shot through with instabilities beyond the reach of children. ... The novelised Peter and Wendy ... is similarly mercurial, with an even more shifting, and shifty, narratorial presence. It is a brilliantly witty, pyrotechnic work, but most children do not know where they stand with it. ... The play, however, though not wholly free from subtle infiltration by the dramatist's own persona, exists chiefly as a powerful dramatic action to which child audiences have direct access' (Children's Books in English, p.554).
4.4 'the play is predominantly a dramatic collage of traditional children's story – pirates, redskins, mermaids, wolves, secret dens and flying – coupled with original (and to adults ominous) additions such as the ticking crocodile, to make an unforgettable theatrical spectacle and the foundation classic of modern children's theatre' (p.555); see 'Drama for Children' (pp.216-20); also see J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Other Plays, ed. Peter Hollindale (Oxford University Press, 1995).
4.5 Peter Pan texts recently subject of biographical and psychoanalytic interpretations that raise different kinds of doubts about suitability for children and/or their construction of childhood: Andrew Birkin's, J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1980) explores Barrie's relationship with the Llewelyn Davis boys; Jacqueline Rose, in The Case of Peter Pan: or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984/93), applies Freudian analysis in context of child abuse scandals of 1980s to suggest that Peter Pan – in fact all children's literature – is a form of child abuse.
4.6 'Oedipal interpretations of the work rest easily on Peter's slaying of Captain Hook and subsequent usurpation of his role as captain, the more so as Captain Hook and Mr Darling are conventionally played by the same actor' (Children's Books in English, p.555).

5. Peter Hollindale, Introduction to J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp.vii-xxviii.
5.1 'It was in Peter and Wendy that [Barrie] polarized most successfully the ambiguities of his central vision – the child-in-adult and the adult-in-child' (p.xiv).
5.2 'In both the stories, ... a chinese-boxes narrative is at work, and below the surface another narrative voice is speaking which is likely to be audible only to grown-ups' (p.xxi):

For the child, ... they are just an irritating puzzle' (p.xxii).

5.3 Hollingdale proposes that the text ought to be cut and edited (censored?).
5.4 'At times in the Peter Pan stories [Barrie's] narrative commuting between child and adult appears to involve an act of trespass (a far more tenable word than [Rose's] 'molestation') into emotional realms which ought to be untouched' (pp.xxiv-xxv).

6. Pan: 'An Arcadian shepherd-god. Pan was a son of Hermes by Penelope or by the daughter of Dryops, of Zeus and Hybris, or of various other parents. In the second version, his goat legs and horns so frightened his mother when he was born that she ran away, but Hermes proudly took the baby to Olympus and showed it off to the other gods. Pan lived in the mountains, where he danced and sang with the nymphs and played his pipes. This instrument ... resulted from one of the god's many amorous forays. While hunting near Nonacris he had come upon a beautiful nymph named Syrinx. He approached her, but she fled, wanting to remain a virgin huntress. Unable to cross the Ladon River, she begged the local nymphs to transform her into marsh reeds. They did so, and Pan had to content himself with fastening several lengths of the reeds together with wax and producing a new instrument. ... Pan once lured Selene into the Arcadian woods by showing, and presumably promising, her a beautiful white fleece. According to Pindar ... Pan was a favorite companion of the Mother of the Gods and the Graces. ... Pan's customary method of overcoming an enemy force was to infect it, by means of a shout, with a sudden, unreasoning terror, or "panic", a word derived from the god's name' (Edward Tripp, Collins Dictionary of Classical Mythology).

7. Peter and Wendy, in Hollindale, ed, pp.69-226.
7.1 Chapter one: narrative focus? intended reader? (p.69); adult satire on upper middle-class English mores? the Darlings? absurd calculations of expenses of having children? parties and nurses (Nana)? dysfunctional family/father? (pp.69-70, p.72); behaviour in second chapter exposes his weakness to his children (p.81, pp.83-84); fathers/father figures problematic; mothers idealised/feared; 'There never was a simpler, happier family until the coming of Peter Pan' (p.72) - tone?
7.2 Exploitation of working-class children (p.72).
7.3 'Peter Breaks Through' (pp.69-77): why? why this family? why Wendy (and her daughter and granddaughter)? what does it mean 'to break through'? from where to where? (p.77).
7.4 Neglected children? Parents absent themselves (at a party, while Nana is locked out); even the stars are 'anxious to get the grown-ups out of the way. ... [and] screamed out "Now, Peter!"' (p.87).
7.5 Childhood is elsewhere?

8. Does children's book begin with chapter 3? But strange tone and narrative tricks continue.
8.1 Sexualisation? Peter, with Tinker Bell, breaks into children's bedroom; has long conversation with Wendy while boys sleep; abducts them; NB description of Tinker Bell (p.88).
8.2 Complexities and ambiguities of central characters: '"Don't have a mother," he said. Not only had he no mother, but he had not the slightest desire to have one. He thought them very overrated persons. Wendy, however, felt at once that she was in the presence of a tragedy' (p.91).
8.3 Wendy as sexually aware/sexualised in encounter with Peter (p.92)? they eventually 'thimble' each other (p.95).
8.4 If Peter refuses to be a man, Wendy seems all too eager to be a woman; he wants 'female companionship' (p.95), but is puzzled by Wendy's and Tinker Bell's (and Tiger Lily's) behaviour: top of p.96.
8.5 Temptation of stories; females as story-tellers/tempters (p.96); but then he tempts her (p.97).

9. Trespass?

10. Two odd but disturbing models of children's minds and adults' relation to them: the child's mind as room or cupboard to be tidied up by mothers; the chaotic map of the child's mind: pp.73-4; intended reader?
10.1 What are the Neverlands? 'Of course the Neverlands vary a great deal' (p.74).

11. Narrative trickery also form of trespass?
11.1 Unpredictable shifting between addressing adults and addressing children (often directly, as 'you', or inclusively, as 'we').
11.2 Often creates impression that child reader can participate in the action: 'Look at the four of them' (p.77).
11.3 Narrative teasing: 'Will they reach the nursery in time?' (p.101).

12. Peter Pan today.
12.1 Play still performed, especially at Christmas.
12.2 Films: Peter Pan (Disney, 1953); Peter Pan (Universal, 2004); plus sequels (e.g., Spielberg's Hook), and associated films such as Finding Neverland (Buena Vista, 2004).
12.3 One review of book on cool-reads by Ben Pomeroy (aged 12); gives it 5 stars and is entirely positive: 'It was written in a symbolic way with very imaginative fantasy writing which made you want to read from the beginning to the end'.
12.4 Over 200 results on Amazon; different editions/versions are rated differently, but often gets 5 stars; but Penguin Popular Classics edition gets two very different reviews:

A beautifully written book from start to finish. A very charming story that, although is fundamentally a children's book, has something to offer to all age groups. (5 stars)

I found the whole book cruel, nightmarish and deeply dubious in its treatment of Peter and Wendy. Was Barrie another Lewis Carroll with a large collection of photographs of naked children in his attic? Don't get me wrong, it's got a cracking plot, but I would never want my kids to read something as insidiously sinister as this. And it's not just me - I studied this book at university level and we all felt the same... (2 stars).

Seminar

Focus on chapter 4 ('The Flight') and part of chapter 5 ('The Island Come True') up to the paragraph ending 'This shows how real the island was' (J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy, edited by Peter Hollindale (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp.102-17).

1. What do these chapters reveal about Peter Pan?

2. What do these chapters reveal about Neverland?

3. On the basis of these chapters, how does Peter and Wendy compare with (a) Tom Sawyer and (b) Treasure Island?

4. To what extent is the content of these chapters appropriate for child readers?

5. What kinds of games does the narrator play in these chapters? Are these games likely to include or exclude child readers?

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